He’s recently been working with Fernanda Viegas, an IBM colleague, on two large public projects. Many Eyes is a site that allows users to upload their own data and create interactive visualizations that add something to a cultural conversation — Sarah Palin’s word choice in her speech at the Republican National Convention led many to create visualizations. Fleshmap explores the relationship between the body and its visual and verbal representation; his visual explains such things as how often a particular body part gets mentioned in songs from different musical genres (eyes get the most mentions in country songs, while the derriere is tops in hip-hop).
“Martin’s work is about democratizing visualization, making it for the masses and not just the elite,” said Karrie Karahalios, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“What makes him stand apart from the rest is that he’s putting it out there as a catalyst for debate and discourse,” Karahalios said.
Wattenberg, whose work can be found at bewitched.com, says that for all his mathematical and technical credentials, his view on the world is that of a humanist.
“It’s about using the computer as a new way to learn about people and cultures,” he said. “Almost everything can be reduced to data, so my job is analogous to the photographer. My projects are about what you choose to look at and how you crop it.”
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